Mixed Race Studies

Japanese Brazilians celebrate mixed heritage

Al Jazeera
2014-06-17

Jillian Kestler-D’Amour, Online Producer

Sao Paulo, Brazil – The room was a mixture of Brazilian green and yellow and Japanese red and white, as more than 200 members of the city’s large Japanese community turned out to watch the country of their ancestors take on Cote d’Ivoire in both teams’ World Cup opening match.

Chants of Japao! (Japan in Portuguese) rang out through the crowd, which was dominated by navy jerseys with the names Honda, Toshio, Takaya, Shiota, and Kagawa affixed to the back. The room erupted when Japanese star Keisuke Honda put the Samurai Blue ahead in the first half, but fans were ultimately stunned when Cote d’Ivoire scored twice in two minutes to win, 2-1.

“I feel very proud that Japan is in the World Cup and that we can host them here in Brazil,” said Analia Kita, before the game began. Wife of Kihatino Kita, the director of the Japanese-Brazilian Association that hosted the screening, Analia said she has tickets to cheer on Japan when the team takes on Switzerland next week in Natal.

“Between Japan and Brazil, it’s going to be very hard to choose [my favourite],” she said laughing. “But it’s going to have to be Brazil. I’m Brazilian.”…

…Dual identities

“We can characterise it as a mixture. We have 106 years of immigration and in this time, we have seen the mixture and integration of the Japanese culture in Brazil,” explained Celia Sakurai, a researcher on Japanese-Brazilian community and culture.

Born in Sao Paulo where she lives today, Sakurai told Al Jazeera that Japanese influence on Brazil’s culture can be viewed through the popularity of anime, Manga comics, and haikai (the Portuguese-language version of a haiku), the practise of judo and taeko (traditional Japanese drumming), and other arts…

Read the entire article here.

People from Mexico show stunning amount of genetic diversity

Science
2014-06-12

Lizzie Wade, Latin America Correspondent

Imagine if people from Kansas and California were as genetically distinct from each other as someone from Germany is from someone from Japan. That’s the kind of remarkable genetic variation that scientists have now found within Mexico, thanks to the first fine-scale study of human genetic variation in that country. This local diversity could help researchers trace the history of the country’s different indigenous populations and help them develop better diagnostic tools and medical treatments for people of Mexican descent living all over the world.

The team has done a “tremendous job” of creating a “blueprint of all the genetic diversity in Mexico,” says Bogdan Pasaniuc, a population geneticist at the University of California (UC), Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research…

…When the team analyzed the genomes of 511 indigenous individuals from all over Mexico, they found a striking amount of genetic diversity. The most divergent indigenous groups in Mexico are as different from each other as Europeans are from East Asians, they report online today in Science. This diversity maps onto the geography of Mexico itself. The farther away ethnic groups live from each other, the more different their genomes turn out to be.

But most people in Mexico or of Mexican descent these days are not indigenous but rather mestizo, meaning they have a mixture of indigenous, European, and African ancestry. Do their genomes also vary by what region of Mexico they come from, or has all that local variation been smoothed out by centuries of different groups meeting, mixing, and having babies?…

Read the entire article here.

LeiLani Nishime explores the Asian American experience in her new book

The Seattle Globalist
2014-03-25

Diane Han
University of Washington

We understand that race doesn’t exist biologically, but it doesn’t mean that race isn’t real.

“We think we see race because it exists in the world, but really, we learn to see race,” says LeiLani Nishime, author of the recently published “Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture.”

“I think the approach to race is not to ignore it or pretend it is not there, but to confront it, see that it’s there, and understand what it does for us in a social context.”

Nishime’s book is a critical examination of the ways multiracial Asian Americans are represented in mass media…

Read the entire article here.

Elliot Rodger’s half-white male privilege

Salon
Thusday, 2014-05-29

Joan Walsh, Editor at Large

The killer’s Asian heritage matters. So does his ugly class entitlement. Misogyny crosses lines of race and culture

The widespread recognition that Elliot Rodger’s killing spree was the tragic result of misogyny and male entitlement has been a little bit surprising, and encouraging. Why, then, has it been so hard to get his race right?

From the left, headlines (including on Salon) have labeled him “white,” though most stories at least nodded to his Asian heritage (his mother was ethnic Chinese Malaysian). Chauncey DeVega’s fascinating piece on Rodger’s crime as evidence of “aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome,” a malady that includes other white male mass killers from Columbine’s Eric Klebold to Newtown’s Adam Lanza, didn’t mention his status as half-Asian.

When commentators noted the omission, DeVega (whose work I admire) doubled down in a follow-up piece,“Yes, Elliot Rodger is white!” He argued that Rodger “constructed an identity for himself as ‘Eurasian’ and proceeded to internalize American society’s cues and lessons about power, privilege, race, and gender. He then lived out his own particular understanding of what it means to be white and male in the United States.”

Not that I have a lot of sympathy for Rodger, but it twists his already twisted story to label him simply white…

…“The media, as usual, has oversimplified his identity and experience of race in typically binary terms, which miss the complex nuances and grey areas of that identity and experience,” University of California, Santa Barbara, sociology professor G. Reginald Daniel told me via email. (Daniel is also the editor in chief of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies.) “My feeling is that some of his many issues are related in part to his struggles with or questions about how ‘white’ he was or was not allowed or perceived to be.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Mixed Blood’

Ecns.cn: The Official English-language website of China News Service
2014-06-05

To many, the US is no doubt a cultural melting pot as over the years people from various ethnic backgrounds have inhabited the land and collectively created an all new culture. Yet, all the way on the other side of the Earth, a similar situation seems to be emerging in China. Through images seen at the exhibition for Mixed Blood at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, visitors will have the chance to glimpse these changes for themselves.

Cosponsored by the US Embassy in Beijing and the Today Art Museum, the Beijing exhibition for Mixed Blood features photographs and documents created by artist CYJO from 2010 to 2013 documenting 19 families of mixed ethnicities, races and cultures living in Beijing and New York.

In the photographs, family members stand in their own homes in a line with arms at their sides, while next to the photographs are introductions explaining the background of each family member and the story of their family.

Standing in the exhibition hall, these photographs don’t just provide a clear image of the life of “mixed families” commonly seen in big cities, but also raise the question: “How far has our society progressed when it comes to ethnicity and race?”…

Read the entire article here.

Self-reported pigmentary phenotypes and race are significant but incomplete predictors of Fitzpatrick skin phototype in an ethnically diverse population

Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
Available online: 2014-06-11
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaad.2014.05.023

Steven Y. He, BS
Department of Dermatology
University of California, San Francisco

Charles E. McCulloch, PhD
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of California, San Francisco

W. John Boscardin, PhD
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Department of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco

Mary-Margaret Chren, MD
Department of Dermatology
University of California, San Francisco

Eleni Linos, MD, MPH, DrPH
Department of Dermatology
University of California, San Francisco

Sarah T. Arron, MD, PhD
Department of Dermatology
University of California, San Francisco

Background

Fitzpatrick skin phototype (FSPT) is the most common method used to assess sunburn risk and is an independent predictor of skin cancer risk. Because of a conventional assumption that FSPT is predictable based on pigmentary phenotypes, physicians frequently estimate FSPT based on patient appearance.

Objective

We sought to determine the degree to which self-reported race and pigmentary phenotypes are predictive of FSPT in a large, ethnically diverse population.

Methods

A cross-sectional survey collected responses from 3386 individuals regarding self-reported FSPT, pigmentary phenotypes, race, age, and sex. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to determine variables that significantly predict FSPT.

Results

Race, sex, skin color, eye color, and hair color are significant but weak independent predictors of FSPT (P < .0001). A multivariate model constructed using all independent predictors of FSPT only accurately predicted FSPT to within 1 point on the Fitzpatrick scale with 92% accuracy (weighted kappa statistic 0.53).

Limitations

Our study enriched for responses from ethnic minorities and does not fully represent the demographics of the US population.

Conclusions

Patient self-reported race and pigmentary phenotypes are inaccurate predictors of sun sensitivity as defined by FSPT. There are limitations to using patient-reported race and appearance in predicting individual sunburn risk.

Read or purchase the article here.

Meeting with Dagmar Schultz and Ria Cheatom

FemGeniuses: Where feminism meets genius!
2014-05-29

Kaimara Herron

It is only the first week of our stay in Berlin, but it feels like an eternity since my plane took-off from O’Hare. But this is certainly not a complaint. We have had the opportunity to do such amazing things in only a few short days, and we have so much more to do.

This morning, we started the day in the classroom at Frauenkreise to talk with Dagmar Schultz and Ria Cheatom about their film Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984 to 1992, which documents their lives as activists and their work in the Afro-German feminist movement. Melissa began our discussion by asking about Audre Lorde’s experiences living with cancer while continuing to work in Berlin. More specifically, Melissa was interested in Lorde’s use of holistic treatments in Berlin instead of conventional methods to treat her cancer. Dagmar’s response was that Lorde never wanted to stop working because it was, and continues to be, a necessary movement. Dagmar believes Berlin had become Lorde’s replacement for New York City, as her work in Berlin became central in her life…

…As the conversation moved along, we started talking about the first few meetings between Afro-German women and Audre Lorde. Ria offered an anecdote about how she had trouble accepting some of the women who attended these meetings as “real” Afro-Germans because of their really light skin and strong European facial features. The topic of color and skin tone was first brought to my attention while reading a section of May Ayim’s Blues in Black and White: A Collection of Essays, Poetry, and Conversations. In “White Stress/Black Nerves,” she briefly mentions how the benefits of privilege become more complicated when examining the experiences of Black and immigrant women based on skin tone…

Read the entire article here.

Thanks, Belle, it’s nice to see a face like mine on screen

The Guardian (The Observer)
2014-06-07

Ashley Clark

In giving top billing to Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the film Belle makes a real contribution to raising awareness of the mixed-race experience

My heart leaps whenever I see the poster for Amma Asante’s new film, Belle, high up on billboards around town. The poised, sincere face of its lead actress, Gugu Mbatha-Raw (a Brit of black South African and white English extraction), towers above an otherwise white cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, and ex-Harry Potter villain Tom Felton.

Why? As a mixed-race Brit myself – white and black Caribbean, as I’ve been checking in the relevant boxes for some years now – it’s always been significant to me to see someone who looks like they could be a close relative in the foreground rather than the background. The film’s protagonist, Dido Elizabeth Belle, as you might now know, is based on an actual 18th-century mixed-race woman of white British and black African heritage who was raised as an aristocrat…

…The sociologist Emma Dabiri convincingly argues that “black-mixed people can be racialised as black, whereas non-black-mixed people are able to inhabit a more ambiguous exotic space”. This, says Dabiri, puts paid to the myth that all mixed-race groups can be packaged together – as the media often attempt to do – as one separate, monolithic community: a tidy narrative of progress…

Read the entire article here.

The Perceptions of Race That Hinge on Stress

The Atlantic
2014-06-09

Olga Khazan, Associate Editor

A new study found that when resources were scarce, white people had different definitions of “black” and were less generous toward people with darker skin tones than toward people with lighter skin.

The Labor Department said on Friday that employers hired 217,000 workers last month, bringing the job market back to 2008 levels.

It took more than four years to get back to this point after the recession wiped out more than 8.7 million jobs in just two years. And most economists think we’re not out of the woods yet: As my colleague Derek Thompson points out, the labor force participation rate is still at a multi-decade low.

But according to a new study, jobs and wealth weren’t the only things we lost in the recession. All of those economic woes might have also influenced how people perceive other races and have made people less generous toward those who look different from them.

For a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Amodio, a psychology professor at New York University and Amy Krosch, a graduate student, performed a series of experiments that showed that their predominantly white study subjects tended to view biracial people as “more black” when they were primed with economic scarcity, and that the subjects were stingier toward darker-complexioned people overall…

Read the entire article here.

Economic scarcity alters the perception of race

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Published online before print on 2014-06-09
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1404448111

Amy R. Krosch
New York University

David M. Amodio, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
New York University

Significance

Racial disparities on socioeconomic indices expand dramatically during economic recession. Although prior explanations for this phenomenon have focused on institutional causes, our research reveals that perceived scarcity influences people’s visual representations of race in a way that may promote discrimination. Across four studies, scarce conditions led perceivers to view Black people as “darker” and “more stereotypically Black” in appearance, relative to control conditions, and this shift in perception under scarcity was sufficient to elicit reduced resource allocations to African American recipients. These findings introduce a “motivated perception” account for the proliferation of racial and ethnic discrimination during times of economic duress.

Abstract

When the economy declines, racial minorities are hit the hardest. Although existing explanations for this effect focus on institutional causes, recent psychological findings suggest that scarcity may also alter perceptions of race in ways that exacerbate discrimination. We tested the hypothesis that economic resource scarcity causes decision makers to perceive African Americans as “Blacker” and that this visual distortion elicits disparities in the allocation of resources. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that scarcity altered perceptions of race, lowering subjects’ psychophysical threshold for seeing a mixed-race face as “Black” as opposed to “White.” In studies 3 and 4, scarcity led subjects to visualize African American faces as darker and more “stereotypically Black,” compared with a control condition. When presented to naïve subjects, face representations produced under scarcity elicited smaller allocations than control-condition representations. Together, these findings introduce a novel perceptual account for the proliferation of racial disparities under economic scarcity.

Read or purchase the article here.